With Civ 2 Brian Reynolds in my eyes did the work of a genious.
The more distance comes between the Civ series and the work of that genious, the worse are the consequences for that series. The idea of integrating an easy way of individual creativity made that game "timeless". Also events and an easy methode of "zooming in" during gameplay are features I´m really missing with Civ 3. Nevertheless I decided to lay my focus on Civ 3, as there were more civs and especially very nice looking units in that game.
Both games Civ 2 and Civ 3 until today provide a lot of fun to me.
With Civ 2 ToT came the first partial decline of the Civ series. They introduced new graphics, that are commonly considered the worst graphics ever done for any Civ game. The idea could have been good, but it was executed very miserable. Not to speak about the bad images of most of the units, they forgot to add defensive animations in their sprites. I tried to improve the unit graphics by importing and adjusting Civ 3 unit graphics,
what looks nice - until it comes to a battle: The attacking unit shoots or beats on the other unit like mad, but the defending unit only stands there without doing anything -until one of the units suddenly falls down or explodes. Nearly all civers disabled the new unit sprites (without noticing the mistake I explained above), but to make the desaster complete, the old Civ 2 combat animations were now disabled in the new programming. Sid, where was your quality control ??? There was a central point missing in a central new feature of that game and it seems, nobody had seen it!! A bad new face of the Civ series here was also shown for the first time: The big mistake was never fixed by them!
Where Civ2 ToT added "more" to existing features of the existing Civ 2 (more events, more unitslots) they were very successful, where they did something new, it ended in a desaster (unit graphics and uncoordinated programming) or was not used very much (multiple maps). The documentation about modding the new feature of multiple maps also became very poor - another shortcomming compared to the explanation for modders in the original Civ 2.
With Civ 3 that story continued. Events, caravans, diplomats and Civ 2-helicopters were cut out of Civ. About the missing of events I wrote above. A very bad shortcomming for the Civ series, especially for scenarios! The new diplomatic menue couldn´t substitute the missing diplomat in many cases and even with tons of modding, diplomacy in Civ 3 is not what it should have been. With the abolishment of an opposing senate for Republic and Democracy, governments were practically reduced for most civers to Republic and the unfunny phases for Anarchy were massively enlarged. The consequence was that the originally great feature of different governments was minimalized in gameplay. The "ignore Citywalls"-flag and the "pikeman"-flag were cut out for modders, so they still would have been very useful for modding Civ 3. On the other side stealth-attack and landbombardement were added to Civ 3. Stealth-attack was never explained properly by Firaxis. It would have been a good new feature, if it would work against a single target-unit in a stack, but in that stack there must be at least two allowed target-units, that this feature can work. That´s why many prominent modders of Civ 3 for many years posted, that this function doesn´t work. It works, but not so as it should.
Landbombardement of the AI in Civ 3 was the next big desaster in the Civ series. The AI withdraw all their artillery to its cities and nearly never used them offensively as it should have been. The programming routine for the landartillery in Civ 3 was -and is - completely spoiled. This was a very central point of Civ 3 as infantry and many other units had better defensive than offensive values and the defensive values of those units should be "softened up" by the artillery. This big and very evident issue was never fixed. Firaxis quality management, where have you been???
Also there were a lot of other annoying issues with Civ 3 and its expansions, there were some very positive features in Civ 3, too. Much more units to add than the 81 of Civ 2 ToT, much more buildings to add, much more civs to add and a bigger world then in Civ 2. The new feature culture was o.k. (but not overwhelming). And there was an extremely lucky windfall in Civ 3: The new units were looking very nice and did perform as they should in Civ 2 ToT. As many of the shortcommings of Civ 3 could be solved by "comming back to the roots of Civ 2", I decided to focus with Civ 3. Of course I was -and still am - sad about the missing events in Civ 3.
Than came the "mega-catastrophe" called Civ 4. The Civ-world didn´t look any longer properly to me. Civ 4 (and later Civ 5) presents the world like a view on a toilet-brush. The units, buildings and cities on the map are standing all in different directions: What a mess!! This had nothing to do with the earth beeing round. It was a part of the high price of introducing a really not needed 3d engine to the game. The world is now presented in all three optical dimensions what in combination with the distortion of the proportion of units in my eyes leads to completely unacceptable results. The units now could be zoomed in again, but compared to Civ 3-units, they lost every second pixle, so they can be presented in the game. Civ 2 showed, that a good zoom function in a civ game is possible, even without a resource-eating 3d engine.
Another consequence of the resource-wasting 3d engine was, that this world now became much smaller to be playable than a world of Civ 3. The salesargument of Civ 4 for the restriction to now much smaller worlds was, that now the game focuses on the specialisation of cities. What a ...
As if it wouldn´t be common tactics since Civ 1 to cumulate the boni of improvements and resources in a city whenever possible. The number of civs in Civ 4 (vanilla) was also massively reduced from the 31 in C3C thanks to that completely unnecessairy 3d-engine. Even with these restrictions (at least for a long time) many civers had massive lag-problems with the performance of Civ 4 in the later phases of the game.
Of course the next feature that made Civ 2 "timeless" was also cut out in Civ 4. There was no longer an editor in Civ 4 and modding became extremely complicated compared to Civ 2 and Civ 3. I never forget, while assisting a good Civ 4 modder to do an interesting ship for Civ 4, the moment when it was noticed, that only the first of the many guns of that ship can fire (Edited: When looking in that thread, there was a time when not even one of the cannons of
HMS Warrior did fire). Modding became a privileg for an elite that needed more and more knowledge, the "modder from the street" focused in Civ 2 became an "outsider".
The combat system in Civ 4 on the first view seemed somewhat improved, but the best tactics with all these so-called "improvements" was to throw all units in a monsterstack, so all these so-called "improvements" in battle became very dubious in my eyes. The use of suicide-catapults against these monster-stacks had nothing to do any longer with history. They also could use flying burning pigs. Welcome in the world of comics! The idea of Sid to combine the features of a wargame (Empire) and the features of a construction game (Sim City) with history became severly corrupted. Civ 4 tried to make a cartoon out of the Civ series on a world like a toilet-brush and leaders like Mickey Mouse
!
With the Firaxian rule of thumb "one third new, one third improved, one third old" it was no wonder that nearly all parts I liked in Civ now in Civ 4 were cut out. So it´s no wonder I never liked Civ 4 and its expansions. But from time to time I try one of the Civ 4 mods to be somewhat informed about Civ 4. The worst thing is, that the ugly and resource-eating 3d-engine can´t be modded away. But there was still something good in Civ 4 - it had a handbook with a good analysis about Civ 3, that I used for my
Civ 3 epic mod CCM.
Civ 5: Indiscutable. It is Civ 4 plus the force to create a Steam account. Now even the printed handbook was cut out. I never bought Civ 5.
So, yes, I prefer 2d-graphics to 3d-engines for games like Civ. Civ isn´t a shooter game -but may be the next incarnation will have this result, because Firaxis is galopping consequently in the wrong direction.
My dream Civ-game would be a Civ 2 with Civ 3 units in a world that is presented like Civ 2 and Civ 3. The world should be at least as big as the worlds in Civ 3. It should be a decision of the player, if he wants to play in a smaller or bigger world and not a restriction as in Civ 4 combined with a very "peculiar" explanation as it was done in Civ 4.
Same problem with civ 5 but at least it looks good.
